The value of segmenting your target audience is well known to marketers across industries. Populations don't exist as a homogenous group but always have variations that color their perceptions and their adoption of product offerings. The same is true for developers.
Software developers can be divided in segments based on many factors. These might be how they make their money, who their users are, which technologies they use, or what their motivations are for selecting a particular technology. They may be discovered as they naturally occur through cluster analysis, or they may be pre-defined to fit categories.
Once developer segments are defined, the value in any persona study comes from profiling those segments. Profiling allows you to recognize distinct personas so you can make targeted appeals to each group. Understanding the personas of your targeted developer segments allows you to:
- Communicate more clearly with each persona
- Provide the tools and technologies each persona uses
- Provide the level and type of support each expects
- Find developers that match the personas for effective outreach
- Understand where each persona can be reached
Today, marketing is becoming a science and setting personas is the first step to applying modern marketing techniques in a world that is more and more individualized.
Don't try to lump all your developers together in a group when there are many differences that can be seen and addressed through identifying personas. Evans Data can help deliver the insights you need to really target each of the segments you need.